Washington (AP) A federal judge on Tuesday said a revised October 5 date the US Commerce Department picked to end the 2020 census may violate an order she issued last week that cleared the way for the head count of every US resident to continue through the end of October. US District Judge Lucy Koh suggested she would be open to issuing a contempt finding against the federal government or making a ruling that her order had been violated.
Last week, the San Jose, California, judge suspended the US Census Bureau’s deadline for ending the head count on Wednesday, which automatically reverted the deadline back to an older Census Bureau plan in which the timeline for ending field operations was October 31. Her order also suspended a December 31 deadline for the Census Bureau to turn in numbers used for apportionment, the process of deciding how many congressional seats each state gets. In her decision, Koh sided with civil rights groups and local governments that had sued the Census Bureau and the Department of Commerce, which oversees the statistical agency, arguing that minorities and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed if the counting ended at the end of September instead of the end of October.
The decision to end the 2020 census on October 5, credited to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Monday, was built on the idea of turning in the apportionment numbers by December 31 which violates her injunction, the judge said. I think it’s inconsistent with what I ordered last Thursday,” Koh said.
August Flentje, an attorney for President Donald Trump’s administration, said the suggestion that the federal government was in contempt was unfair.” Trump administration attorneys were in courts on both coasts Tuesday, fighting over when the 2020 census would end and how the data would be used for deciding how many congressional seats each state gets. In the nation’s capital, Trump administration attorneys asked a panel of three judges to dismiss a challenge to a memorandum from Trump seeking to exclude people in the country illegally from being counted in the apportionment process.
Tuesday’s virtual court arguments in the District of Columbia were part of the latest hearing over the legality of Trump’s July memorandum. Arguments already have made heard in federal cases in Maryland and New York, where a three-judge panel blocked the presidential order earlier this month, ruling it was unlawful. The New York judges’ order prohibits Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose agency oversees the US Census Bureau, from excluding people in the country illegally when handing in 2020 census figures used to calculate apportionment. The Trump administration has appealed to the US Supreme Court and asked for the judges’ order to be suspended during that process. The judges on Tuesday denied that request.(AP) .
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